But when once again he is confronted with the strange sad face, and hears once more the pitiful appeal, all hesitations vanish, and he sees no duty

"Like daring try be good and true myself, Leaving the shows of things to the Lord of Show."

With the security of perfect innocence he flings at his judges as "the final fact"—

"In contempt for all misapprehending ignorance Of the human heart, much more the mind of Christ,— That I assuredly did bow, was blessed By the revelation of Pompilia."

Thus, through all the psychologic subtlety of the portrait the groundwork of spiritual romance subsists. The militant saint of legend reappears, in the mould and garb of the modern world, subject to all its hampering conditions, and compelled to make his way over the corpses, not of lions and dragons only, but of consecrated duties and treasured instincts. And the matter-of-course chivalry of professed knighthood is as inferior in art as in ethics to the chivalry to which this priest, vowed to another service, is lifted by the vision of Pompilia.

Pompilia is herself, like her soldier saint, vowed to another service. But while he only after a struggle overcomes the apparent discrepancy between his duty as a priest and as a knight, she rises with the ease and swiftness of a perfectly pure and spiritual nature from the duty of endurance to the duty of resistance—

"Promoted at one cry O' the trump of God to the new service, not To longer bear, but henceforth fight, be found Sublime in new impatience with the foe!"[54]

[Footnote 54: The Pope, 1057.]

And she carries the same fearless simplicity into her love. Caponsacchi falters and recoils in his adorations of her, with the compunction of the voluptuary turned ascetic; he hardly dares to call his passion by a name which the vulgar will mumble and misinterpret: she, utterly unconscious of such peril, glories in the immeasurable devotion

"Of my one friend, my only, all my own, Who put his breast between the spears and me."

Pompilia is steeped in the remembrance of the poet's "Lyric Love." Remote enough this illiterate child must seem from the brilliant and accomplished Elizabeth Browning. But Browning's conception of his wife's nature had a significant affinity to his portrayal of Pompilia. She, he declared, was "the poet," taught by genius more than by experience; he himself "the clever person," effectively manipulating a comprehensive knowledge of life. Pompilia does indeed put her narrow experience to marvellous use; her blending of the infantine with the profound touches the bounds of possible consistency; but her naive spiritual instinct is ever on the alert, and fills her with a perpetual sense of the strangeness of the things that happen, a "childlike, wondering yet subtle perception of the anomalies of life."

Spiritual simplicity has received no loftier tribute than from the most opulent and complex poetic intellect of our day. He loves to bring such natures into contrast with the cunning and cleverness of the world; to show an Aprile, a David, a Pippa loosening the tangle of more complicated lives with a song. Pompilia is a sister of the same spiritual household as these. But she is a far more wonderful creation than any of them; the same exquisite rarity of soul, but unfolded under conditions more sternly real, and winning no such miraculous alacrity of response. In lyrical wealth and swiftness Browning had perhaps advanced little since the days of Pippa; but how much he had grown in Shakespearian realism is fairly measured by the contrast between that early, half-legendary lyric child, by whose unconscious alchemy the hard hearts of Asolo are suddenly turned, and this later creation, whose power over her world, though not less real, is so much more slowly and hardly achieved. Her "song" is only the ravishing "unheard melody" which breathes like incense from her inarticulate childhood. By simple force of being what she is, she turns the priest into the saint, compels a cynical society to believe in spiritual love, and wins even from the husband who bought her and hated her and slew her the confession of his last desperate cry—

"Pompilia, will you let them murder me?"

In contrast with these two, who shape their course by the light of their own souls, the authorised exponents of morality play a secondary and for the most part a sorry part. The old Pope mournfully reflects that his seven years' tillage of the garden of the Church has issued only in the "timid leaf and the uncertain bud," while the perfect flower, Pompilia, has sprung up by the wayside 'neath the foot of the enemy, "a mere chance-sown seed."

"Where are the Christians in their panoply? The loins we girt about with truth, the breasts Righteousness plated round, the shield of faith?... Slunk into corners!"

The Aretine Archbishop, who thrust the suppliant Pompilia back upon the wolf, the Convent of Convertities, who took her in as a suffering saint, and after her death claimed her succession because she was of dishonest life, the unspeakable Abate and Canon, Guido's brothers,—it is these figures who have played the most sinister part, and the old Pope contemplates them with the "terror" of one who sees his fundamental assumptions shaken at the root. For here the theory of the Church was hard to maintain. Not only had the Church, whose mission it was to guide corrupt human nature by its divine light, only darkened and destroyed, but the saving love and faith had sprung forth at the bidding of natural promptings of the spirit, which its rule and law were to supersede.[55] The blaze of "uncommissioned meteors" had intervened where the authorised luminaries failed, and if they dazzled, it was with excess of light. Was Caponsacchi blind?

"Ay, as a man should be inside the sun, Delirious with the plenitude of light."[56]

[Footnote 55: The Pope, 1550 f.]

[Footnote 56: The Pope, 1563.]

It is easy to imagine how so grave an indictment would have been forced home by the author of the Cenci had this other, less famous, "Roman murder-case" fallen into his hands. The old Godwinian virus would have found ready material in this disastrous breakdown of a great institution, this magnificent uprising of emancipated souls. Yet, though the Shelleyan affinities of Browning are here visible enough, his point of view is clearly distinct. The revolutionary animus against institutions as the sole obstacle to the native goodness of man has wholly vanished; but of historic or mystic reverence for them he has not a trace. He parts company with Rousseau without showing the smallest affinity to Burke. As sources of moral and spiritual growth the State and the Church do not count. Training and discipline have their relative worth, but the spirit bloweth where it listeth, and the heights of moral achievement are won by those alone in whom it breathes the heroism of aspiration and resolve. His idealists grow for the most part in the interstices of the social organism. He recognises them, it is true, without difficulty even in the most central and responsible organs of government. None of his unofficial heroes—Paracelsus or Sordello or Rabbi ben Ezra—has a deeper moral insight than the aged Pope. But the Pope's impressiveness for Browning and for his readers lies just in his complete emancipation from the bias of his office. He faces the task of judgment, not as an infallible priest, but as a man, whose wisdom, like other men's, depends upon the measure of his God-given judgment, and flags with years. His "grey ultimate decrepitude" is fallible, Pope though he be; and he naively submits the verdict it has framed to the judgment of his former self, the vigorous, but yet uncrowned, worker in the world. This summing-up of the case is in effect the poet's own, and is rich in the familiar prepossessions of Browning's individualist and unecclesiastical mind. He vindicates Caponsacchi more in the spirit of an antique Roman than of a Christian; he has open ears for the wisdom of the pagan world, and toleration for the human Euripides; scorn for the founder of Jesuitism, sympathy for the heretical Molinists; and he blesses the imperfect knowledge which makes faith hard. The Pope, like his creator, is "ever a fighter," and his last word is a peremptory rejection of all appeals for mercy, whether in the name of policy, Christian forgiveness, or "soft culture," and a resolve to

"Smite with my whole strength once more, ere end my part, Ending, so far as man may, this offence."

And with this solemn and final summing-up—this quietly authoritative keynote into which all the clashing discords seem at length to be resolved—the poem, in most hands, would have closed. But Browning was too ingrained a believer in the "oblique" methods of Art to acquiesce in so simple and direct a conclusion; he loved to let truth struggle through devious and unlikely channels to the heart instead of missing its aim by being formally proclaimed or announced. Hence we are hurried from the austere solitary meditation of the aged Pope to the condemned cell of Guido, and have opened before us with amazing swiftness and intensity all the recesses of that monstrous nature, its "lips unlocked" by "lucidity of soul." It ends, not on a solemn keynote, but in that passionate and horror-stricken cry where yet lurks the implicit confession that he is guilty and his doom just—

"Pompilia, will you let them murder me?"

It is easy—though hardly any longer quite safe—to cavil at the unique structure of The Ring and the Book. But this unique structure, which probably never deterred a reader who had once got under way, answers in the most exact and expressive way to Browning's aims. The subject is not the story of Pompilia only, but the fortunes of her story, and of all stories of spiritual naivete such as hers, when projected upon the variously refracting media of mundane judgment and sympathies. It is not her guilt or innocence only which is on trial, but the mind of man in its capacity to receive and apprehend the surprises of the spirit. The issue, triumphant for her, is dubious and qualified for the mind of man, where the truth only at last flames forth in its purity. Browning even hints at the close that "one lesson" to be had from his work is the falseness of human estimation, fame, and speech. But for the poet who thus summed up the purport of his twenty thousand verses, this was not the whole truth of the matter. Here, as always, that immense, even riotous, vitality of his made the hazards and vicissitudes of the process even more precious than the secure triumph of the issue, and the spirit of poetry itself lured him along the devious ways of minds in which personality set its own picturesque or lurid tinge upon truth. The execution vindicated the design. Voluble, even "mercilessly voluble," the poet of The Ring and the Book undoubtedly is. But it is the volubility of a consummate master of expression, in whose hands the difficult medium of blank verse becomes an instrument of Shakespearian flexibility and compass, easily answering to all the shifts and windings of a prodigal invention, familiar without being vulgar, gritty with homely detail without being flat; always, at its lowest levels, touched, like a plain just before sunrise, with hints of ethereal light, momentarily withheld; and rising from time to time without effort to a magnificence of phrase and movement touched in its turn with that suggestion of the homely and the familiar which in the inmost recesses of Browning's genius lurked so near—so vitally near—to the roots of the sublime.



CHAPTER VII.

AFTERMATH.

Which wins—Earth's poet or the Heavenly Muse? —Aristophanes' Apology.

The publication of The Ring and the Book marks in several ways a turning-point in Browning's career. Conceived and planned before the tragic close of his married life, and written during the first desolate years of bereavement, it is, more than any other of his greater poems, pervaded by his wife's spirit, a crowning monument to his Lyric Love. But it is also the last upon which her spirit left any notable trace. With his usual extraordinary recuperative power, Browning re-moulded the mental universe which her love had seemed to complete, and her death momentarily to shatter, into a new, lesser completeness. He lived in the world, and frankly "liked earth's way," enjoying the new gifts of friendship and of fame which the years brought in rich measure. The little knot of critics whose praise even of Men and Women and Dramatis Personae; had been little more than a cry in the wilderness, found their voices lost in the chorus of admiration which welcomed the story of Pompilia. Some stout recalcitrants, it is true, like Edward FitzGerald, held their ground. And while the tone of even hostile criticism became respectful, enough of it remained to provide objects, seven years later, for the uproarious chaff of Pacchiarotto.

From 1869 to 1871 Browning published nothing, and he appears also to have written nothing beyond a sonnet commemorating Helen, the mother of Lord Dufferin (dated April 26, 1870), almost the only set of fourteen lines in his works of which not one proclaims his authorship. But the decade which followed was more prolific than any other ten years of his life. Between 1871 and 1878 nine volumes in swift succession allured, provoked, or bewildered the reading world. Everything was now planned on a larger scale; the vast compass and boundless volubility of The Ring and the Book became normal. He gave free rein to his delight in intricate involutions of plot and of argument; the dramatic monologue grew into novels in verse like Red-cotton Night-cap Country and The Inn Album; and the "special pleaders," Hohenstiel and Juan, expounded their cases with a complexity of apparatus unapproached even by Sludge. A certain relaxation of poetic nerve is on the whole everywhere apparent, notwithstanding the prodigal display of crude intellectual power. His poetic alchemy is less potent, the ore of sordid fact remains sordid still. Not that his high spirituality is insecure, his heroic idealism dimmed; but they coalesce less intimately with the alert wit and busy intelligence of the mere "clever man," and seek their nutriment and material more readily in regions of legend and romance, where the transmuting work of imagination has been already done. It is no accident that his lifelong delight in the ideal figures of Greek tragedy, so unlike his own creations, became in these years for the first time an effective source of poetry. The poems of this decade form thus an odd motley series—realism and romance interlaced but hardly blent, Aeschylus and Euripides, the divine helper Herakles and the glorious embodiment of the soul of Athens, Balaustion, emerging and re-emerging after intervals occupied by the chicaneries of Miranda or the Elder Man. No inept legend for the Browning of this decade is the noble song of Thamuris which his Aristophanes half mockingly declaimed. "Earth's poet" and "the heavenly Muse" are not allies, and they at times go different ways.

Herve Riel (published March 1871) is less characteristic of Browning in purely literary quality than in the hearty helpfulness which it celebrates, and the fine international chivalry by which it was inspired. The French disasters moved him deeply; he had many personal ties with France, and was sharing with his dearest French friend, Joseph Milsand, as near neighbour, a primitive villeggiatura in a Norman fishing-village when the stupendous catastrophe of Sedan broke upon them. Sympathy with the French sufferers induced Browning to do violence to a cherished principle by offering the poem to George Smith for publication in The Cornhill. Most of its French readers doubtless heard of Herve Riel, as well as of Robert Browning, for the first time. His English readers found it hard to classify among the naval ballads of their country, few of which had been devoted to celebrating the exploits of foreign sailors, or the deliverance of hostile fleets. But they recognised the poet of The Ring and the Book, Herve has no touch of Browning's "philosophy." He is none the less a true kinsman, in his homely fashion, of Caponsacchi,—summoned in a supreme emergency for which the appointed authorities have proved unequal.

A greater tale of heroic helpfulness was presently to engage him. Balaustion's Adventure was, as the charming dedication tells us, the most delightful of May-month amusements; but in the splendid proem which enshrines the story of Herakles and Alkestis, we still feel the thrill of the deadly conflict; the agony of France may be partly divined in the agony of Athens. Thirty years before, he had shown, in the noble fragmentary "prologue" to a Hippolytus (Artemis Prologizes), a command of the majestic, reticent manner of Greek tragedy sufficiently remarkable in one whose natural instincts of expression were far more Elizabethan than Greek. The incongruity of Greek dramatic methods with his own seems to have speedily checked his progress; but Euripides, the author of the Greek Hippolytus, retained a peculiar fascination for him, and it was on another Euripidean drama that he now, in the fulness of his powers, set his hand. The result certainly does not diminish our sense of the incongruity. Keenly as he admired the humanity and pathos of Euripides, he challenges comparison with Euripides most successfully when he goes completely his own way. He was too robustly original to "transcribe" well, and his bold emphatic speech, curbed to the task of reproducing the choice and pregnant sobriety of Attic style, is apt to eliminate everything but the sobriety. The "transcribed" Greek is often yet flatter than "literal" versions of Greek verse are wont to be, and when Browning speaks in his own person the style recovers itself with a sudden and vehement bound, like a noble wild creature abruptly released from restraint. Among the finest of these "recoveries" are the bursts of description which Balaustion's enthusiasm interjects between the passages of dialogue. Such is the magnificent picture of the coming of Herakles. In the original he merely enters as the chorus end their song, addressing them with the simple inquiry, "Friends, is Admetos haply within?" to which the chorus reply, like civil retainers, "Yes, Herakles, he is at home." Browning, or his Balaustion, cannot permit the mighty undoer of the tragic harms to come on in this homely fashion. A great interrupting voice rings suddenly through the dispirited maunderings of Admetos' house-folk; and the hearty greeting, "My hosts here!" thrills them with the sense that something good and opportune is at hand:—

"Sudden into the midst of sorrow leapt, Along with the gay cheer of that great voice Hope, joy, salvation: Herakles was here! Himself o' the threshold, sent his voice on first To herald all that human and divine I' the weary, happy face of him,—half god, Half man, which made the god-part god the more."

The heroic helpfulness of Herakles is no doubt the chief thing for Browning in the story. The large gladness of spirit with which he confronts the meticulous and perfunctory mourning of the stricken household reflected his own habitual temper with peculiar vividness. But it is clear that the Euripidean story contained an element which Browning could not assimilate—Admetos' acceptance of Alkestis' sacrifice. To the Greek the action seemed quite in order; the persons who really incurred his reproof were Admetos' parents, who in spite of their advanced years refused to anticipate their approaching death in their son's favour. Browning cannot away with an Admetos who, from sheer reluctance to die, allowed his wife to suffer death in his place; and he characteristically suggests a version of the story in which its issues are determined from first to last, and on both sides, by self-sacrificing love. Admetos is now the large-minded king who grieves to be called away before his work for his people is done. Alkestis seeks, with Apollo's leave, to take his place, so that her lord may live and carry out the purposes of his soul,—

"Nor let Zeus lose the monarch meant in thee."

But Admetos will not allow this; for Alkestis is as spirit to his flesh, and his life without her would be but a passive death. To which "pile of truth on truth" she rejoins by adding the "one truth more," that his refusal of her sacrifice would be in effect a surrender of the supreme duty laid upon him of reigning a righteous king,—that this life-purpose of his is above joy and sorrow, and the death which she will undergo for his and its sake, her highest good as it is his. And in effect, her death, instead of paralysing him, redoubles the vigour of his soul, so that Alkestis, living on in a mind made better by her presence, has not in the old tragic sense died at all, and finds her claim to enter Hades rudely rejected by "the pensive queen o' the twilight," for whom death meant just to die, and wanders back accordingly to live once more by Admetos' side. Such the story became when the Greek dread of death was replaced by Browning's spiritual conception of a death glorified by love. The pathos and tragic forces of it were inevitably enfeebled; no Herakles was needed to pluck this Alkestis from the death she sought, and the rejection of her claim to die is perilously near to Lucianic burlesque. But, simply as poetry, the joyous sun-like radiance of the mighty spoiler of death is not unworthily replaced by the twilight queen, whose eyes

"lingered still Straying among the flowers of Sicily,"

absorbed in the far memory of the life that Herakles asserted and enforced,—until, at Alkestis' summons, she

"broke through humanity Into the orbed omniscience of a god."

From his idealised Admetos Browning passed with hardly a pause to attempt the more difficult feat of idealising a living sovereign. Admetos was ennobled by presenting him as a political idealist; the French Emperor, whose career had closed at Sedan, was in some degree qualified for a parallel operation by the obscurity which still invested the inmost nature of that well-meaning adventurer. Browning had watched Louis Napoleon's career with mixed feelings; he had resented the coup d'etat, and still more the annexation of Savoy and Nice after the war of 1859. But he had never shared the bitter animus which prevailed at home. He was equally far, no doubt, from sharing the exalted hero-worship which inspired his wife's Poems before Congress. The creator of The Italian in England, of Luigi, and Bluphocks, could not but recognise the signal services of Napoleon to the cause of Italian freedom, however sharply he condemned the hard terms on which Italy had been compelled to purchase it. "It was a great action; but he has taken eighteenpence for it—which is a pity";[57] it was on the lines of this epigram, already quoted, that eleven years later he still interpreted the fallen emperor, and that he now completed, as it would seem, the abandoned poem of 1860. He saw in him a man of generous impulses doubled with a borne politician, a ruler of genuine Liberal and even democratic proclivities, which the timid calculations of a second-rate opportunist reduced to a contemptible travesty of Liberalism. The shifting standpoints of such a man are reproduced with superfluous fidelity in his supposed Defence, which seems designed to be as elusive and impalpable as the character it reflects. How unlike the brilliant and precise realism of Blougram, sixteen years before! The upcurling cloud-rings from Hohenstiel's cigar seem to symbolise something unsubstantial and evasive in the whole fabric. The assumptions we are invited to form give way one after another. Leicester Square proves the "Residenz," the "bud-mouthed arbitress" a shadowy memory, the discourse to a friendly and flattered hearer a midnight meditation. And there is a like fluctuation of mood. Now he is formally justifying his past, now musing, half wistfully, half ironically, over all that he might have been and was not. At the outset we see him complacently enough intrenched within a strong position, that of the consistent opportunist, who made the best of what he found, not a creator but a conservator, "one who keeps the world safe." But he has ardent ideas and aspirations. The freedom of Italy has kindled his imagination, and in the grandest passage of the poem he broods over his frustrate but deathless dream:—

"Ay, still my fragments wander, music-fraught, Sighs of the soul, mine once, mine now, and mine For ever! Crumbled arch, crushed aqueduct, Alive with tremors in the shaggy growth Of wild-wood, crevice-sown, that triumphs there, Imparting exultation to the hills."

[Footnote 57: Letters of E.B.B., ii. 385.]

But if he had abandoned these generous dreams, he had won free trade and given the multitude cheap bread, and in a highly ingenious piece of sophistry he explains, by the aid of the gospel of Evolution, how men are united by their common hunger, and thrust apart by their conflicting ideas. But Hohenstiel knows very well that his intrenchments are not unassailable; and he goes on to compose an imaginary biography of himself as he might have been, with comments which reflect his actual course. The finest part of this aethereal voyage is that in which his higher unfulfilled self pours scorn upon the paltry duplicities of the "Peace" policy by which his actual and lower self had kept on good terms abroad, and beguiled the imperious thirst for "la gloire" at home. Indignantly the author of Herve Riel asks why "the more than all magnetic race" should have to court its rivals by buying their goods untaxed, or guard against them by war for war's sake, when Mother Earth has no pride above her pride in that same

"race all flame and air And aspiration to the boundless Great, The incommensurably Beautiful— Whose very falterings groundward come of flight Urged by a pinion all too passionate For heaven and what it holds of gloom and glow."

The Ring and the Book had made Browning famous. But fame was far from tempting him to undue compliance with the tastes of his new-won public; rather it prompted him to indulge his genius more freely, and to go his own way with a more complete security and unconcern. Hohenstiel-Schwangau—one of the rockiest and least attractive of all Browning's poems—had mystified most of its readers and been little relished by the rest. And now that plea for a discredited politician was followed up by what, on the face of it, was, as Mrs Orr puts it, "a defence of inconstancy in marriage." The apologist for Napoleon III. came forward as the advocate of Don Juan. The prefixed bit of dialogue from Moliere's play explains the situation. Juan, detected by his wife in an intrigue, is completely nonplussed. "Fie!" cries Elvire, mockingly (in Browning's happy paraphrase),—

"Fie! for a man of mode, accustomed at the court To such a style of thing, how awkwardly my lord Attempts defence!"

In this emergency, Browning, as it would seem, steps in, and provides the arch-voluptuary with a philosophy of illicit love, quite beyond the speculative capacity of any Juan in literature, and glowing with poetry of a splendour and fertility which neither Browning himself nor the great English poet who had identified his name with that of Juan, and whom Browning in this very poem overwhelms with genial banter, ever surpassed. The poem inevitably challenged comparison with Byron's masterpiece. In dazzling play of intellect, in swift interchange of wit and passion, the English nineteenth century produced nothing more comparable to the Don Juan of Byron than Fifine at the Fair.

It cannot be denied that the critics had some excuse who, like Mortimer, frankly identified Browning with his hero, and described the poem as an assertion of the "claim to relieve the fixity of conjugal affection by varied adventure in the world of temporary loves."[58] For Browning has not merely given no direct hint of his own divergence from Juan, corresponding to his significant comment upon Blougram—"he said true things but called them by false names"; he has made his own subtlest and profoundest convictions on life and art spring spontaneously from the brain of this brilliant conqueror of women. Like Goethe's Faust, he unmistakably shares the mind, the wisdom, the faith, of his creator; it is plausible to suppose that the poet indorses his application of them. This is unquestionably a complete mistake; but Browning, as usual, presumed too much upon his readers' insight, and took no pains to obviate a confusion which he clearly supposed to be impossible.

[Footnote 58: Mrs Orr, Life, p. 297. Her own criticism is, however, curiously indecisive and embarrassed.]

It was on the strand at Pornic that he encountered the fateful gipsy whom he calls Fifine. Arnold, years before, had read unutterable depths of soul in another gipsy child by another shore. For Browning now, as in the days of the Flight of the Duchess, the gipsy symbolised the life of joyous detachment from the constraints of society and civilisation. The elementary mood, out of which the wondrous woof of reasonings and images is evolved, is simply the instinctive beat of the spirit of romance in us all, in sympathy with these light-hearted losels of the wild, who "cast allegiance off, play truant, nor repine," and though disgraced but seem to relish life the more.

The beautiful Prologue—one of the most original lyrics in the language—strikes the keynote:—

"Sometimes, when the weather Is blue, and warm waves tempt To free oneself of tether, And try a life exempt

From worldly noise and dust, In the sphere which overbrims With passion and thought,—why, just Unable to fly, one swims....

Emancipate through passion And thought,—with sea for sky, We substitute, in a fashion, For heaven—poetry."

It is this "emancipation" from our confinement in the bonds of prose, commonplace, and routine, by a passion and thought-winged imagination, which is the true subject of the poem. But he chooses to convey his meaning, as usual, through the rich refracting medium of dramatic characters and situations quite unlike his own. So his "apology for poetry" becomes an item in Don Juan's case for the "poetry" of dalliance with light-o'-loves. Fifine herself acquires new importance; the emancipated gipsy turns into the pert seductive coquette, while over against her rises the pathetic shadow of the "wife in trouble," her white fingers pressing Juan's arm, "ravishingly pure" in her "pale constraint." Between these three persons the moving drama is played out, ending, like all Don Juan stories, with the triumph of the baser influence. Elvire, with her eloquent silences and wistful pathos, is an exquisite creation,—a wedded sister of Shakespeare's Hero; Fifine, too, with her strutting bravado and "pose half frank, half fierce," shrills her discordant note vivaciously enough. The principal speaker himself is the most complex of Browning's casuists, a marvellously rich and many-hued piece of portraiture. This Juan is deeply versed in all the activities of the imagination which he so eloquently defends. Painting and poetry, science and philosophy, are at his command; above all, he is an artist and a poet in the lore of Love.

It is easy to see that the kind of adventure on which Juan claims the right of projecting his imagination has close affinities with the habitual procedure of Browning's own. Juan defends his dealings with the gay fizgig Fifine as a step to the fuller appreciation of Elvire; he demands freedom to escape only as a means of possessing more surely and intimately what he has. And Browning's "emancipation" is not that of the purely Romantic poet, who pursues a visionary abstraction remote from all his visible environment. The emancipated soul, for him, was rather that which incessantly "practised with" its environment, fighting its way through countless intervening films of illusion to the full knowledge of itself and of all that it originally held in posse. This might not be an adequate account of his own artistic processes, in which genial instinct played a larger, and resolute will a smaller, part than his invincible athleticism of temperament would suggest. But his marvellous wealth of spontaneous vision was fed and enriched by incessant "practice with" his environment; his idealism was vitalised by the ceaseless play of eye and brain upon the least promising mortal integuments of spirit; he possessed "Elvire" the more securely for having sent forth his adventurous imagination to practise upon innumerable Fifines.

The poem itself—as a defence of his poetic methods—was an "adventure" in which imagination played an unusually splendid part. A succession of brilliant and original images, visions, similes, parables, exhibits the twofold nature of the "stuff" with which the artist plays,—its inferiority, its poverty, its "falseness" in itself, its needfulness, its potency, its worth for him. It is the water which supports the swimmer, but in which he cannot live; the dross of straw and chaff which yields the brilliant purity of flame (c. 55); the technical cluster of sounds from which issues "music—that burst of pillared cloud by day and pillared fire by night" (c. 41). The whole poem is haunted by the sense of dissonance which these images suggest between the real and the apparent meaning of things. Browning's world, else so massive and so indubitable, becomes unsubstantial and phantasmal, an illusive pageant in which Truth is present only under a mask, being "forced to manifest itself through falsehood." Juan, who declares that, unlike poets, "we prose-folk" always dream, has, in effect, a visionary quality of imagination which suits his thesis and his theme. The "dream figures" of the famous ladies pass before us like a gorgeous tapestry,—some rich Venetian rendering of a medieval ballade du temps jadis; then Venice itself opens before us, all moving life and colour, under the enchantment of Schumann's Carnival, only to resolve itself into a vaster pageant of the world, with its mighty fanes of art and science, which, seemingly "fixed as fate, not fairy-work," yet

"tremblingly grew blank From bright, then broke afresh in triumph,—ah, but sank As soon, for liquid change through artery and vein O' the very marble wound its way."

The August of 1872 found Browning and his sister once more in France. This time, however, not at Croisic but Saint Aubin—the primitive hamlet on the Norman coast to which he had again been drawn by his attachment to Joseph Milsand. At a neighbouring village was another old friend, Miss Thackeray, who has left a charming account of the place. They walked along a narrow cliff-path: "The sea-coast far below our feet, the dried, arid vegetation of the sandy way, the rank yellow snapdragon lining the paths.... We entered the Brownings' house. The sitting-room door opened to the garden and the sea beyond—a fresh-swept bare floor, a table, three straw chairs, one book upon the table." A misunderstanding, now through the good offices of Milsand happily removed, had clouded the friendship of Browning and Miss Thackeray; and his joyous revulsion of heart has left characteristic traces in the poem which he dedicated to his "fair friend." The very title is jest—an outflow of high spirits in an exuberantly hearty hand-shake—"British man with British maid"; the country of the "Red-cotton Night-cap" being in fact, of course, the country which her playful realism had already nicknamed "White-cotton Night-cap Country," from the white lawn head-dress of the Norman women. Nothing so typical and everyday could set Browning's imagination astir, and among the wilderness of white, innocent and flavourless, he caught at a story which promised to be "wrong and red and picturesque," and vary "by a splotch the righteous flat of insipidity."

The story of Miranda the Paris jeweller and his mistress, Clara de Millefleurs, satisfied this condition sufficiently. Time had not mellowed the raw crudity of this "splotch," which Browning found recorded in no old, square, yellow vellum book, but in the French newspapers of that very August; the final judgment of the court at Caen ("Vire") being actually pronounced while he wrote. The poet followed on the heels of the journalist, and borrowed, it must be owned, not a little of his methods. If any poem of Browning's may be compared to versified special correspondence, it is this. He tells the story, in his own person, in blank verse of admirable ease and fluency, from which every pretence of poetry is usually remote. What was it in this rather sordid tale that arrested him? Clearly the strangely mingled character of Miranda. Castile and Paris contend in his blood; and his love adventures, begun on the boulevards and in their spirit, end in an ecstasy of fantastic devotion. His sins are commonplace and prosaic enough, but his repentances detach him altogether from the herd of ordinary penitents as well as of ordinary sinners—confused and violent gesticulations of a visionary ascetic struggling to liberate himself from the bonds of his own impurity. "The heart was wise according to its lights"; but the head was incapable of shaping this vague heart-wisdom into coherent practice. A parallel piece of analysis presents Clara as a finished artist in life—a Meissonier of limited but flawless perfection in her unerring selection of means to ends. In other words, this not very attractive pair struck Browning as another example of his familiar contrast between those who "try the low thing and leave it done," and those who aim higher and fail. Yet it must be owned that these Browningesque ideas are not thoroughly wrought into the substance of the poem; they are rather a sort of marginal embroidery woven on to a story which, as a whole, has neither been shaped by Browning's hand nor vitalised with his breath. Neither Clara nor Miranda can be compared in dramatic force with his great creations; even Clara's harangue to the Cousinry, with all its passion and flashing scorn, is true rather to her generic character as the injured champion of her dead lord than to her individual variety of it—the woman of subtle, inflexible, yet calculating devotion. Miranda's soliloquy before he throws himself from the Tower is a powerful piece of construction, but, when the book is closed, what we seem to see in it is not the fantastical goldsmith surveying the motives of his life, but Browning filling in the bizarre outlines of his construction with appropriate psychological detail. Another symptom of decline in Browning's most characteristic kind of power is probably to be found in the play of symbolism which invests with an air of allegorical abstraction the "Tower" and the "Turf," and makes the whole poem, with all its prosaic realism, intelligibly regarded as a sort of fantasia on self-indulgence and self-control.

The summer retreat of 1874 was found once more on the familiar north coast of France,—this time at the quiet hamlet of Mers, near Treport. In this lonely place, with scarcely a book at hand, he wrote the greater part of the most prodigally and exuberantly learned of all his poems—Aristophanes' Apology (published April 1875). It was not Browning's way to repeat his characters, but the story of Balaustion, the brilliant girl devotee of Euripides, had proved an admirable setting for his interpretations of Greek drama; and the charm of that earlier "most delightful of May-month amusements" was perhaps not the less easily revived in these weeks of constant companionship with a devoted woman-friend of his own. Balaustion is herself full ten years older than at the time of her first adventure; her fresh girlish enthusiasm has ripened into the ardent conviction of intellectual maturity; she can not only cite Euripides, but vindicate his art against his mightiest assailant. Situation, scenery, language, are here all more complex. The first Adventure was almost Greek in its radiant and moving simplicity; the last is Titanically Browningesque, a riot of the least Hellenic elements of Browning's mind with the uptorn fragments of the Hellenic world. Moreover, the issue is far from being equally clear. The glory of Euripides is still the ostensible theme; but Aristophanes had so many points of contact with Browning himself, and appeals in his defence to so many root-ideas of Browning's own, that the reader hesitates between the poet to whom Browning's imagination allied him, and the poet whom his taste preferred. His Aristophanes is, like himself, the poetry of "Life," a broad and generous realist, who like Lippo Lippi draws all existence into his art; an enemy of all asceticisms and abstractions, who drives his meaning home through vivid concrete example and drastic phrase, rather than by enunciating the impressive moral commonplaces of tragic poetry.[59] Aristophanes, too, had been abused for his "unintelligible" poetry,—"mere psychologic puzzling,"[60]—by a "chattering" public which preferred the lilt of nursery rhymes. The magnificent portrait of Aristophanes is conceived in the very spirit of the riotous exuberance of intellect and senses—

"Mind a-wantoning At ease of undisputed mastery Over the body's brood"—

which was so congenial to the realist in Browning; "the clear baldness—all his head one brow"—and the surging flame of red from cheek to temple; the huge eyeballs rolling back native fire, imperiously triumphant, the "pursed mouth's pout aggressive," and "the beak supreme above," "beard whitening under like a vinous foam."

[Footnote 59: Arist. Ap., p. 698.]

[Footnote 60: Ib., p. 688.]

Balaustion is herself the first to recognise the divinity shrouded in this half satyr-like form: in some of the finest verses of the poem she compares him to the sea-god, whom as a child she had once seen peer

"large-looming from his wave,

* * * * *

A sea-worn face, sad as mortality, Divine with yearning after fellowship,"

while below the surface all was "tail splash, frisk of fin." And when Balaustion has recited her poet's masterpiece of tragic pathos, Aristophanes lays aside the satirist a moment and attests his affinity to the divine poets by the noble song of Thamyris. The "transcript from Euripides" itself is quite secondary in interest to this vivid and powerful dramatic framework. Far from being a vital element in the action, like the recital of the Alkestis, the reading of the Hercules Furens is an almost gratuitous diversion in the midst of the talk; and the tameness of a literal (often awkwardly literal) translation is rarely broken by those inrushes of alien genius which are the glory of Browning's Alkestis. Yet the very self-restraint sprang probably from Browning's deep sensibility to the pathos of the story. "Large tears," as Mrs Orr has told us, fell from his eyes, and emotion choked his voice, when he first read it aloud to her.

The Inn Album is, like Red-cotton Night-cap Country, a versified novel, melodramatic in circumstances, frankly familiar in scenery and atmosphere. Once more, as in the Blot in the 'Scutcheon, and in James Lee's Wife, Browning turned for his "incidents in the development of souls" to the passion and sin-frayed lives of his own countrymen. But no halo of seventeenth-century romance here tempers the sordid modernity of the facts; the "James Lee" of this tragedy appears in person and is drawn with remorseless insistence on every mean detail which announces the "rag-and-feather hero-sham." Everything except his wit and eloquence is sham and shabby in this Club-and-Country-house villain, who violates more signally than any figure in poetic literature the canon that the contriver of the tragic harms must not be totally despicable. A thief, as Schiller said, can qualify for a tragic hero only by adding to his theft the more heroic crime of murder; but Browning's Elder Man compromises even the professional perfidies of a Don Juan with shady dealings at cards and the like which Don Juan himself would have scouted. In Fifine the Don Juan of tradition was lifted up into and haloed about with poetical splendours not his own; here he is depressed into an equally alien sorriness of prose. But the decisive and commanding figure, for Browning and for his readers, is of course his victim and Nemesis, the Elder Lady. She is as unlike Pompilia as he is unlike Guido; but we see not less clearly how the upleaping of the soul of womanhood in the child, under the stress of foul and cruel wrongs, has once more asserted its power over him. And if Pompilia often recalls his wife, the situation of the Elder Lady may fairly remind us of that of Marion Erle in Aurora Leigh. But many complexities in the working out mark Browning's design. The betrayed girl, scornfully refusing her betrayer's tardy offer of marriage, has sought a refuge, as the wife of a clergyman, in the drudgery of a benighted parish. The chance meeting of the two, four years after, in the inn parlour, their bitter confessions, through the veil of mutual hatred, that life has been ruined for both,—he, with his scandalous successes growing at last notorious, she, the soul which once "sprang at love," now sealed deliberately against beauty, and spent in preaching monstrous doctrines which neither they nor their savage parishioners believe nor observe,—all this is imagined very powerfully and on lines which would hardly have occurred to any one else.

The Pacchiarotto volume forms a kind of epilogue to the work of the previous half-dozen years. Since The Ring and the Book he had become a famous personage; his successive poems had been everywhere reviewed at length; a large public was genuinely interested in him, while a yet larger complained of his "obscurity," but did not venture to ignore him, and gossiped eagerly about his private life. He himself, mingling freely, an ever-welcome guest, in the choicest London society, had the air of having accepted the world as cordially as it on the whole accepted him. Yet barriers remained. Poems like the Red-cotton Night-cap Country, the Inn Album, and Fifine had alienated many whom The Ring and the Book had won captive, and embarrassed the defence of some of Browning's staunchest devotees. Nobody knew better than the popular diner-out, Robert Browning, how few of the men and women who listened to his brilliant talk had any grip upon his inner mind; and he did little to assist their insight. The most affable and accessible of men up to a certain point, he still held himself, in the deeper matters of his art, serenely and securely aloof. But it was a good-humoured, not a cynical, aloofness, which found quite natural expression in a volley of genial chaff at the critics who thought themselves competent to teach him his business. This is the main, at least the most dominant, note of Pacchiarotto. It is like an aftermath of Aristophanes' Apology. But the English poet scarcely deigns to defend his art. No beautiful and brilliant woman is there to put him on his mettle and call out his chivalry. The mass of his critics are roundly made game of, in a boisterously genial sally, as "sweeps" officiously concerned at his excess of "smoke." Pacchiarotto is a whimsical tale of a poor painter who came to grief in a Quixotic effort to "reform" his fellows. Rhyme was never more brilliantly abused than in this tour de force, in which the clang of the machinery comes near to killing the music. More seriously, in the finely turned stanzas At the Mermaid, and House, he avails himself of the habitual reticence of Shakespeare to defend by implication his own reserve, not without a passing sarcasm at the cost of the poet who took Europe by storm with the pageant of his broken heart. House is for the most part rank prose, but it sums up incisively in the well-known retort:

"'With this same key Shakespeare unlocked his heart,' once more! Did Shakespeare? If so, the less Shakespeare he!"

This "house" image is singularly frequent in this volume. The poet seems haunted by the idea of the barrier walls, which keep off the public gaze, but admit the privileged spirit. In Fears and Scruples it symbolises the reticence of God. In Appearances the "poor room" in which troth was plighted and the "rich room" in which "the other word was spoken" become half human in sympathy. A woman's "natural magic" makes the bare walls she dwells in a "fairy tale" of verdure and song. The prologue seems deliberately to strike this note, with its exquisite idealisation of the old red brick wall and its creepers lush and lithe,—a formidable barrier indeed, but one which spirit and love can pass. For here the "wall" is the unsympathetic throng who close the poet in; there

"I—prison-bird, with a ruddy strife At breast, and a life whence storm-notes start— Hold on, hope hard in the subtle thing That's spirit: though cloistered fast, soar free; Account as wood, brick, stone, this ring Of the rueful neighbours, and—forth to thee!"

These stanzas finely hint at a second theme which wanders in and out among the strident notes of Browning's anti-critical "apologetics." Of all the springs of poetry none lay deeper in Browning than love; to the last he could sing of love with the full inspiration of his best time; and the finest things in this volume are concerned with it. But as compared with the love-lays of the Dramatic Lyrics or Men and Women there is something wistful, far off, even elegiac, in this love-poetry. A barrier, undefinable but impassable, seems to part us from the full tide of youthful passion. The richest in this tender sunset beauty is the St Martin's Summer, where the late love is suddenly smitten with the discovery that its apparent warmth is a ghost of old passion buried but unallayed. Again and again Browning here dwells upon the magic of love,—as if love still retained for the ageing poet an isolated and exceptional irradiating power in a world fast fading into commonplace and prose. The brief, exquisite snatches of song, Natural Magic, Magical Nature, are joyous tributes to the power of the charm, paid by one who remains master of his heart. Numpholeptos is the long-drawn enchanted reverie of one in the very toils of the spell—a thing woven of dreams and emotions, dark-glowing, iridescent to the eye, languorous to the ear, impalpable to the analytic intellect. In Bifurcation he puts again, with more of subtlety and of detachment, the problem of the conventional conflict of love with duty, so peremptorily decided in love's favour in The Statue and the Bust. A Forgiveness is a powerful reworking of the theme of My Last Duchess, with an added irony of situation: Browning, who excels in the drama of silent figures, has drawn none more effective than this guilty priest, who grinds his teeth behind the confessional grating as he listens perforce to the story of his own crime from the lips of the wronged husband, still cherishing the hope that he is unrecognised, or at the worst may elude vengeance in his cloister's solitude; until the avenger's last words throw off the mask:—

"Hardly, I think! As little helped his brow The cloak then, Father—as your grate helps now!"

From these high matters of passion and tragedy we pass by easy steps into the jocular-colloquial region in which the volume opened. Painting in these later days of Browning's has ceased to yield high, or even serious poetry, and Baldinucci's tale of shabby trickery cannot be compared, even for grotesque humour, with the powerful grotesquerie of Holy-Cross Day, while it wholly lacks the great lift of Hebraic sublimity at the close. The Epilogue returns to the combative apologetics of the title poem; but, unlike that, does attempt some reply to the cavils of the discontented. They cannot have the strong and the sweet—body and bouquet—at once, he tells them in effect, and he chooses to be strong, to give the good grape and leave the cowslips growing in the meadow. The argument was but another sally of the poet's good-humoured chaff, and would not have stood the scrutiny of his subtler mind. Doubtless he, like Ben Jonson, inclined to see signs of the "strong" in the astringent and the gritty; but no one knew better, when he chose, to wed his "strength" with "sweetness." The falling-off of the present volume compared with Men and Women or Dramatis Personae lay less in the lack of either quality than in his failure to bring them together. Of the "stiff brew" there is plenty; but the choicest aroma comes from that "wine of memories"—the fragrant reminiscences—which the poet affected to despise. The epilogue ends, incorrigibly, with a promise to "posset and cosset" the cavilling reader henceforward with "nettle-broth," good for the sluggish blood and the disordered stomach.

The following year brought a production which the cavilling reader might excusably regard as a fulfilment of this jocose threat. For the translation of the Agamemnon (1877) was not in any sense a serious contribution to the English knowledge and love of Greek drama. The Balaustion "transcripts" had betrayed an imperfect sensibility to the finer qualities of Greek dramatic style. But Browning seems to have gone to work upon the greatest of antique tragedies with the definite intention of showing, by a version of literal fidelity, how little the Greek drama at its best owed to Greek speech. And he has little difficulty in making the oracular brevity of Aeschylus look bald, and his sublime incoherences frigid.[61] The result is, nevertheless, very interesting and instructive to the student of Browning's mind. Nowhere else do we feel so acutely how foreign to his versatile and athletic intellect was the primitive and elemental imagination which interprets the heart and the conscience of nations. His acute individualism in effect betrayed him, and made his too faithful translation resemble a parody of this mighty fragment of the mind of Themistoclean Athens by one of the brilliant irresponsible Sophists of the next generation.

[Footnote 61: It is hard to explain how Browning came also to choose his restless hendecasyllables as a medium for the stately iambic of AEschylus. It is more like Fletcher outdoing himself in double endings.]

The spring and summer of 1877 were not productive. The summer holiday was spent in a new haunt among the Savoy Alps, and Browning missed the familiar stimulus of the sea-air. But the early autumn brought an event which abruptly shattered his quiescence, and called forth, presently, the most intimately personal poem of his later years. Miss Ann Egerton-Smith, his gifted and congenial companion at London concerts, and now, for the fourth year in succession, in the summer villeggiatura, died suddenly of heart disease at dawn on Sept. 14, as she was preparing for a mountain expedition with her friends. It was not one of those losses which stifle thought or sweep it along on the vehement tide of lyric utterance; it was rather of the kind which set it free, creating an atmosphere of luminous serenity about it, and allaying all meaner allurements and distractions. Elegy is often the outcome of such moods; and the elegiac note is perceptible in the grave music of La Saisiaz. Yet the poem as a whole does not even distantly recall, save in the quiet intensity of its ground tone, the noble poems in which Milton or Shelley, Arnold or Tennyson, commemorated their dead friends. He himself commemorated no other dead friend in a way like this; to his wife's memory he had given only the sacred silence, the impassioned hymn, the wealth of poetry inspired by her spirit but not addressed to her. This poem, also, was written "once, and only once, and for one only." La Saisiaz recalls to us, perversely perhaps, poems of his in which no personal sorrow beats. The glory of the dawn and the mountain-peak—Saleve with its outlook over the snowy splendour of Mont Blanc—instils itself here into the mourner's mood, as, long before, a like scene had animated the young disciples of the Grammarian; while the "cold music" of Galuppi's Toccata seems to be echoed inauspiciously in these lingering trochaics. Something of both moods survives, but the dominant tone is a somewhat grey and tempered hope, remote indeed from the oppressive sense of evanescence, the crumbling mortality, of the second poem, remote no less from the hushed exaltation, the subdued but rapturous confidence of the first.

The poet is growing old; the unity of poetic vision is breaking up into conflicting aspects only to be adjusted in the give and take of debate; he puts off his singing robes to preside as moderator, while Fancy and Reason exchange thrust and parry on the problem of immortality; delivering at last, as the "sad summing up of all," a balanced and tentative affirmation. And he delivers the decision with an oppressive sense that it is but his own. He is "Athanasius contra mundum"; and he dwells, with a "pallid smile" which Athanasius did not inspire, upon the marvellous power of fame. Nay, Athanasius himself has his doubts. Even his sober hope is not a secure possession; but in the gloom of London's November he remembers that he had hoped in the sunset glory of Saleve, and "saves up" the memory of that pregnant hour for succour in less prosperous times.

The Two Poets of Croisic, published with La Saisiaz, cannot be detached from it. The opening words take up the theme of "Fame," there half mockingly played with, and the whole poem is a sarcastic criticism of the worship of Fame. The stories of Rene Gentilhomme and Paul Desfarges Maillard are told with an immense burly vivacity, in the stanza, and a Browningesque version of the manner, of Beppo. Both stories turned upon those decisive moments which habitually caught Browning's eye. Only, in their case, the decisive moment was not one of the revealing crises which laid bare their utmost depths, but a crisis which temporarily invested them with a capricious effulgence. Yet these instantaneous transformations have a peculiar charm for Browning; they touch and fall in with his fundamental ideas of life; and the delicious prologue and epilogue hint these graver analogies in a dainty music which pleasantly relieves the riotous uncouthness of the tale itself. If Rene's life is suddenly lighted up, so is the moss bank with the "blue flash" of violets in spring; and the diplomatic sister through whose service Paul wins his laurels has a more spiritual comrade in the cicada, who, with her little heart on fire, sang forth the note of the broken string and won her singer his prize. Browning's pedestrian verse passes into poetry as he disengages from the transient illusions, the flickerings and bickerings, of Fame, the eternal truth of Love. But it is only in the closing stanzas of the main poem that his thought clearly emerges; when, having exposed the vanity of fame as a test of poetic merit, he asks how, then, poets shall be tried; and lays down the characteristic criterion, a happy life. But it is the happiness of Rabbi ben Ezra, a joy three parts pain, the happiness won not by ignoring evil but by mastering it!—

"So, force is sorrow, and each sorrow, force: What then? since Swiftness gives the charioteer The palm, his hope be in the vivid horse Whose neck God clothed with thunder, not the steer Sluggish and safe! Yoke Hatred, Crime, Remorse, Despair: but ever mid the whirling fear Let, through the tumult, break the poet's face Radiant, assured his wild slaves win the race!"



CHAPTER VIII.

THE LAST DECADE.

Where the quiet-coloured end of evening smiled.

Since the catastrophe of 1861 Browning had not entered Italy. In the autumn of 1878 he once more bent his steps thither. Florence, indeed, he refused to revisit; it was burnt in upon his brain by memories intolerably dear. But in Venice the charm of Italy reasserted itself, and he returned during his remaining autumns with increasing frequency to the old-fashioned hostelry, Dell' Universo, on the Grand Canal, or latterly, to the second home provided by the hospitality of his gifted and congenial American friend, Mrs Arthur Bronson. Asolo, too, the town of Pippa, he saw again, after forty years' absence, with poignant feelings,—"such things have begun and ended with me in the interval!" But the poignancy of memory did not restore the magic of perception which had once been his. The mood described ten years later in the Prologue to Asolando was already dominant: the iris glow of youth no longer glorified every common object of the natural world, but "a flower was just a flower." The glory still came by moments; some of his most thrilling outbursts of song belong to this time. But he built up no more great poems. He was approaching seventy, and it might well seem that if so prolific a versifier was not likely to become silent his poetry was rapidly resolving itself into wastes of theological argument, of grotesque posturing, or intellectualised anecdotage. The Dramatic Idyls of 1879 and 1880 showed that these more serious forebodings were at least premature. There was little enough in them, no doubt, of the qualities traditionally connected with "idyll." Browning habitually wore his rue with a difference, and used familiar terms in senses of his own. There is nothing here of "enchanted reverie" or leisurely pastoralism. Browning's "idyls" are studies in life's moments of stress and strain, not in its secluded pleasances and verdurous wooded ways. It is for the most part some new variation of his familiar theme—the soul taken in the grip of a tragic crisis, and displaying its unsuspected deeps and voids. Not all are of this kind, however; and while his keenness for intense and abnormal effects is as pronounced as ever, he seeks them in an even more varied field. Italy, the main haunt of his song, yields—it can hardly be said to have inspired—one only of the Idyls—Pietro of Abano. Old memories of Russia are furbished up in Ivan Ivanovitch, odd gatherings from the byways of England and America in Ned Bratts, Halbert and Hob, Martin Relph; and he takes from Virgil's hesitating lips the hint of a joyous pagan adventure of the gods, and tells it with his own brilliant plenitude and volubility. The mythic treatment of nature had never appealed much to Browning, even as a gay decorative device; he was presently to signalise his rejection of it in Gerard de Lairesse, a superb example of what he rejected. In all mythology there was something foreign to the tenacious humanity of his intellect; he was most open to its appeal where it presented divinity stretching forth a helping hand to man. The noble "idyl" of Echetlos is thus a counterpart, in its brief way, to the great tragic tale of Herakles and Alkestis. Echetlos, the mysterious ploughman who shone amid the ranks at Marathon,

"clearing Greek earth of weed As he routed through the Sabian and rooted up the Mede,"

is one of the many figures which thrill us with Browning's passion for Greece, and he is touched with a kind of magic which it did not lie in his nature often to communicate. But the great successes of the Dramatic Idyls are to be found mainly among the tales of the purely human kind that Browning had been used to tell. Pheidippides belongs to the heroic line of How they brought the Good News and Herve Riel. The poetry of crisis, of the sudden, unforeseen, and irremediable critical moment, upon which so much of Browning's psychology converges, is carried to an unparalleled point of intensity in Clive and Martin Relph. And in most of these "idyls" there emerges a trait always implicit in Browning but only distinctly apparent in this last decade—the ironical contrasts between the hidden deeps of a man's soul and the assumptions or speculations of his neighbours about it. The two worlds—inner and outer—fall more sharply apart; stranger abysses of self-consciousness appear on the one side, more shallow and complacent illusions on the other. Relph's horror of remorse—painted with a few strokes of incomparable intensity, like his 'Get you behind the man I am now, you man that I used to be!'—is beyond the comprehension of the friendly peasants; Clive's "fear" is as much misunderstood by his auditor as his courage by the soldiers; the "foolishness" of Muleykeh equally illudes his Arab comrades; the Russian villagers, the Pope, and the lord have to fumble through a long process of argument to the conclusion which for Ivan had been the merest matter of fact from the first. Admirable in its quiet irony is the contrast between the stormy debate over his guilt or innocence and his serene security of mind as he sits cutting out a toy for his children:—

"They told him he was free As air to walk abroad; 'How otherwise?' asked he."

With the "wild men" Halbert and Hob it is the spell of a sudden memory which makes an abrupt rift between the men they have seemed to be and the men they prove. Browning in his earlier days had gloried in these moments of disclosure; now they served to emphasise the normal illusion. "Ah me!" sounds the note of the proem to the second series, scornful and sad:—

"Ah me! So ignorant of man's whole, Of bodily organs plain to see— So sage and certain, frank and free, About what's under lock and key— Man's soul!"

The volume called Jocoseria (1883) contains some fine things, and abounds with Browning's invariable literary accomplishment and metrical virtuosity, but on the whole points to the gradual disintegration of his genius. "Wanting is—what?" is the significant theme of the opening lyric, and most of the poetry has something which recalls the "summer redundant" of leaf and flower not "breathed above" by vitalising passion. Compared with the Men and Women or the Dramatis Personae, the Jocoseria as a whole are indeed

"Framework which waits for a picture to frame, ... Roses embowering with nought they embower."

Browning, the poet of the divining imagination, is less apparent here than the astute ironical observer who delights in pricking the bubbles of affectation, stripping off the masks of sham, and exhibiting human nature in unadorned nakedness. Donald is an exposure, savage and ugly, of savagery and ugliness in Sport; Solomon and Balkis a reduction, dainty and gay, of these fabled paragons of wisdom to the dimensions of ordinary vain and amorous humanity. Lilith and Eve unmask themselves under stress of terror, as Balkis and Solomon at the compulsion of the magic ring, and Adam urbanely replaces the mask. Jochanan Hakka-dosh, the saintly prop of Israel, expounds from his deathbed a gospel of struggle and endurance in which a troubled echo of the great strain of Ben Ezra may no doubt be heard; but his career is, as a whole, a half-sad, half-humorous commentary on the vainness of striving to extend the iron frontiers of mortality. Lover, poet, soldier, statist have each contributed a part of their lives to prolong and enrich the saint's: but their fresh idealisms have withered when grafted upon his sober and sapless brain; while his own garnered wisdom fares no better when committed to the crude enthusiasm of his disciples. But twice, in this volume, a richer and fuller music sounds. In the great poem of Ixion, human illusions are still the preoccupying thought; but they appear as fetters, not as specious masks, and instead of the serio-comic exposure of humanity we see its tragic and heroic deliverance. Ixion is Browning's Prometheus. The song that breaks from his lips as he whirls upon the penal wheel of Zeus is a great liberating cry of defiance to the phantom-god—man's creature and his ape—who may plunge the body in torments but can never so baffle the soul but that

"From the tears and sweat and blood of his torment Out of the wreck he rises past Zeus to the Potency o'er him, Pallid birth of my pain—where light, where light is, aspiring, Thither I rise, whilst thou—Zeus take thy godship and sink."

And in Never the Time and the Place, the pang of love's aching void and the rapture of reunion blend in one strain of haunting magical beauty, the song of an old man in whom one memory kindles eternal youth, a song in which, as in hardly another, the wistfulness of autumn blends with the plenitude of spring.

Browning spent the summer months of 1883 at Gressoney St Jean, a lonely spot high up in the Val d'Aosta, living, as usual when abroad, on the plainest of vegetable diet. "Delightful Gressoney!" he wrote,

"Who laughest, 'Take what is, trust what may be!'"

And a mood of serene acquiescence in keeping with the scene breathes from the poem which occupied him during this pleasant summer. To Browning's old age, as to Goethe's, the calm wisdom and graceful symbolism of Persia offered a peculiar attraction. In the Westoestlicher Divan, seventy years earlier, Goethe, with a subtler sympathy, laid his finger upon the common germs of Eastern and Western thought and poetry. Browning, far less in actual touch with the Oriental mind, turned to the East in quest of picturesque habiliments for his very definitely European convictions—"Persian garments," which had to be "changed" in the mind of the interpreting reader.

The Fancies have the virtues of good fables,—pithy wisdom, ingenious moral instances, homely illustrations, easy colloquial dialogue; and the ethical teaching has a striking superficial likeness to the common-sense morality of prudence and content, which fables, like proverbs, habitually expound. "Cultivate your garden, don't trouble your head about insoluble riddles, accept your ignorance and your limitations, assume your good to be good and your evil to be evil, be a man and nothing more"—such is the recurring burden of Ferishtah's counsel. But such preaching on Browning's lips always carried with it an implicit assumption that the preacher had himself somehow got outside the human limitations he insisted on; that he could measure the plausibility of man's metaphysics and theology, and distinguish between the anthropomorphism which is to be acquiesced in because we know no better, and that which is to be spurned because we know too much. Ferishtah's thought is a game of hide-and-seek, and its movements have all the dexterity of winding and subterfuge proper to success in that game. Against the vindictive God of the creeds he trusts his human assurance that pain is God's instrument to educate us into pity and love; but when it is asked how a just God can single out sundry fellow-mortals

"To undergo experience for our sake, Just that the gift of pain, bestowed on them, In us might temper to the due degree Joy's else-excessive largess,"—

instead of admitting a like appeal to the same human assurance, he falls back upon the unfathomable ways of Omnipotence. If the rifts in the argument are in any sense supplied, it is by the brief snatches of song which intervene between the Fancies, as the cicada-note filled the pauses of the broken string. These exquisite lyrics are much more adequate expressions of Browning's faith than the dialogues which professedly embody it. They transfer the discussion from the jangle of the schools and the cavils of the market-place to the passionate persuasions of the heart and the intimate experiences of love, in which all Browning's mysticism had its root. Thus Ferishtah's pragmatic, almost philistine, doctrine of "Plot-culture," by which human life is peremptorily walled in within its narrow round of tasks, "minuteness severed from immensity," is followed by the lyric which tells how Love transcends those limits, making an eternity of time and a universe of solitude. Finally, the burden of these wayward intermittent strains of love-music is caught up, with an added intensity drawn from the poet's personal love and sorrow, in the noble Epilogue. As he listens to the call of Love, the world becomes an enchanted place, resounding with the triumph of good and the exultant battle-joy of heroes. But a "chill wind" suddenly disencharms the enchantment, a doubt that buoyant faith might be a mirage conjured up by Love itself:—

"What if all be error, If the halo irised round my head were—Love, thine arms?"

He disdains to answer; for the last words glow with a fire which of itself dispels the chill wind. A faith founded upon love had for Browning a surer guarantee than any founded upon reason; it was secured by that which most nearly emancipated men from the illusions of mortality, and enabled them to see things as they are seen by God.

The Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day (1887) is a more laboured and, save for one or two splendid episodes, a less remarkable achievement than Ferishtah. All the burly diffuseness which had there been held in check by a quasi-oriental ideal of lightly-knit facility and bland oracular pithiness, here has its way without stint, and no more songs break like the rush of birds' wings upon the dusty air of colloquy. Thrusting in between the lyrics of Ferishtah and Asolando, these Parleyings recall those other "people of importance" whose intrusive visit broke in upon "the tenderness of Dante." Neither their importance in their own day nor their relative obscurity, for the most part, in ours, had much to do with Browning's choice. They do not illustrate merely his normal interest in the obscure freaks and out-of-the-way anomalies of history. The doings of these "people" had once been "important" to Browning himself, and the old man's memory summoned up these forgotten old-world friends of his boyhood to be championed or rallied by their quondam disciple. The death of the dearest friend of his later life, J. Milsand, in 1886, probably set these chords vibrating; the book is dedicated to his memory. Perhaps the Imaginary Conversations of an older friend and master of Browning's, one even more important in Browning's day and in ours than in his own, and the master of his youth, once more suggested the scheme. But these Parleyings are conversations only in name. They are not even monologues of the old brilliantly dramatic kind. All the dramatic zest of converse is gone, the personages are the merest shadows, nothing is seen but the old poet haranguing his puppets or putting voluble expositions of his own cherished dogmas into their wooden lips. We have glimpses of the boy, when not yet able to compass an octave, beating time to the simple but stirring old march of Avison "whilom of Newcastle organist"; and before he has done, the memory masters him, and the pedestrian blank verse breaks into a hymn "rough, rude, robustious, homely heart athrob" to Pym the "man of men." Or he calls up Bernard Mandeville to confute the formidable pessimism of his old friend Carlyle—"whose groan I hear, with guffaw at the end disposing of mock—melancholy." Gerard de Lairesse, whose rococo landscapes had interested him as a boy, he introduces only to typify an outworn way of art—the mythic treatment of nature; but he illustrates this "inferior" way with a splendour of poetry that makes his ironic exposure dangerously like an unwitting vindication. These visions of Prometheus on the storm-swept crag, of Artemis hunting in the dawn, show that Browning was master, if he had cared to use it, of that magnificent symbolic speech elicited from Greek myth in the Hyperion or the Prometheus Unbound. But it was a foreign idiom to him, and his occasional use of it a tour de force.

Two years only now remained for Browning, and it began to be apparent to his friends that his sturdy health was no longer secure. His way of life underwent no change, he was as active in society as ever, and acquaintances, old and new, still claimed his time, and added to the burden, always cheerfully endured, of his correspondence. In October 1887 the marriage of his son attached him by a new tie to Italy, and the Palazzo Rezzonico on the Grand Canal, where "Pen" and his young American wife presently settled, was to be his last, as it was his most magnificent, abode. To Venice he turned his steps each autumn of these last two years; lingering by the way among the mountains or in the beautiful border region at their feet. It was thus that, in the early autumn of 1889, he came yet once again to Asolo. His old friend and hostess, Mrs Arthur Bronson, had discovered a pleasant, airy abode on the old town-wall, overhanging a ravine, and Asolo, seen from this "castle precipice-encurled," recovered all its old magic. It was here that he put together the disconnected pieces, many written during the last two years in London, others at Asolo itself, which were finally published on the day of his death. The Tower of Queen Cornaro still overlooked the little town, as it had done half a century before; and he attached these last poems to the same tradition by giving them the pleasant title said to have been invented by her secretary. Asolando—Facts and Fancies, both titles contain a hint of the ageing Browning,—the relaxed physical energy which allows this strenuous waker to dream (Reverie; Bad Dreams); the flagging poetic power, whose fitful flashes could no longer transfigure the world for him, but only cast a fantastic flicker at moments across its prosaic features. The opening lines sadly confess the wane of the old vision:—

"And now a flower is just a flower: Man, bird, beast are but beast, bird, man— Simply themselves, uncinct by dower Of dyes which, when life's day began, Round each in glory ran."

The famous Epilogue is the last cheer of an old warrior in whom the stout fibre of heroism still held out when the finer nerve of vision decayed; but A Reverie shows how heavy a strain it had to endure in sustaining his faith that the world is governed by Love. Of outward evidence for that conviction Browning saw less and less. But age had not dimmed his inner witness, and those subtle filaments of mysterious affinity which, for Browning, bound the love of God for man to the love of man for woman, remained unimpaired. The old man of seventy-seven was still, in his last autumn, singing songs redolent, not of autumn, but of the perfume and the ecstasy of spring and youth,—love-lyrics so illusively youthful that one, not the least competent, of his critics has refused to accept them as work of his old age. Yet Now and Summum Bonum, and A Pearl, a Girl, with all their apparent freshness and spontaneity, are less like rapt utterances of passion than eloquent analyses of it by one who has known it and who still vibrates with the memory. What preoccupies and absorbs him is not the woman, but the wonder of the transfiguration wrought for him by her word or kiss,—the moment made eternal, the "blaze" in which he became "lord of heaven and earth." But some of the greatest love-poetry of the world—from Dante onwards—has reflected an intellect similarly absorbed in articulating a marvellous experience. For the rest, Asolando is a miscellany of old and new,—bright loose drift from the chance moods of genius, or bits of anecdotic lumber carefully recovered and refurbished, as in prescience of the nearing end.

Yet no such prescience appears to have been his. His buoyant confidence in his own vitality held its own. He was full of schemes of work. At the end of October the idyllic days at Asolo ended, and Browning repaired for the last time to the Palazzo Rezzonico. A month later he caught a bronchial catarrh; failure of the heart set in, and on the evening of December 12 he peacefully died. On the last day of the year his body was laid to rest in "Poets' Corner."



PART II.

BROWNING'S MIND AND ART



CHAPTER IX.

THE POET.

Then, who helps more, pray, to repair our loss— Another Boehme with a tougher book And subtler meanings of what roses say,— Or some stout Mage, like him of Halberstadt, John, who made things Boehme wrote thoughts about? He with a "look you!" vents a brace of rhymes, And in there breaks the sudden rose herself,

* * * * *

Buries us with a glory, young once more, Pouring heaven into this shut house of life.

—Transcendentalism.

I.

"I have, you are to know," Browning once wrote to Miss Haworth, "such a love for flowers and leaves ... that I every now and then in an impatience at being unable to possess them thoroughly, to see them quite, satiate myself with their scent,—bite them to bits." "All poetry," he wrote some twenty years later to Ruskin, "is the problem of putting the infinite into the finite." Utterances like these, not conveyed through the lips of some "dramatic" creation, but written seriously in his own person to intimate friends, give us a clue more valuable it may be than some other utterances which are oftener quoted and better known, to the germinal impulses of Browning's poetic work. "Finite" and "infinite" were words continually on his lips, and it is clear that both sides of the antithesis represented instincts rooted in his mental nature, drawing nourishment from distinct but equally fundamental springs of feeling and thought. Each had its stronghold in a particular psychical region. The province and feeding-ground of his passion for "infinity" was that eager and restless self-consciousness which he so vividly described in Pauline, seeking to "be all, have, see, know, taste, feel all," to become all natures, like Sordello, yet retain the law of his own being. "I pluck the rose and love it more than tongue can speak," says the lover in Two in the Campagna. Browning had his full portion of the romantic idealism which, under the twofold stimulus of literary and political revolution, had animated the poetry of the previous generation. But while he clearly shared the uplifted aspiring spirit of Shelley, it assumed in him a totally different character. Shelley abhors limits, everything grows evanescent and ethereal before his solvent imagination, the infinity he aspires after unveils itself at his bidding, impalpable, undefined, "intense," "inane." Whereas Browning's restlessly aspiring temperament worked under the control of an eye and ear that fastened with peculiar emphasis and eagerness upon all the limits, the dissonances, the angularities that Shelley's harmonising fancy dissolved away. The ultimate psychological result was that the brilliant clarity and precision of his imagined forms gathered richness and intensity of suggestion from the vaguer impulses of temperament, and that an association was set up between them which makes it literally true to say that, for Browning, the "finite" is not the rival or the antithesis, but the very language of the "infinite,"—that the vastest and most transcendent realities have for him their points d'appui in some bit of intense life, some darting bird or insect, some glowing flower or leaf. Existence ebbs away from the large, featureless, monotonous things, to concentrate itself in a spiked cypress or a jagged mountain cleft. A placid soul without "incidents" arrests him less surely than the fireflies on a mossy bank. Hence, while "the finite" always appears, when explicitly contrasted with "the infinite," as the inferior,—as something soi-disant imperfect and incomplete,—its actual status and function in Browning's imaginative world rather resembles that of Plato's peras in relation to the apeiron,—the saving "limit" which gives definite existence to the limitless vague.

II.

Hence Browning, while a romantic in temper, was, in comparison with his predecessors, a thorough realist in method. All the Romantic poets of the previous generation had refused and decried some large portion of reality. Wordsworth had averted his ken from half of human fate; Keats and Shelley turned from the forlornness of human society as it was to the transfigured humanity of myth. All three were out of sympathy with civilisation; and their revolt went much deeper than a distaste for the types of men it bred. They attacked a triumphant age of reason in its central fastness, the brilliant analytic intelligence to which its triumphs were apparently due. Keats declaimed at cold philosophy which undid the rainbow's spells; Shelley repelled the claim of mere understanding to settle the merits of poetry; Wordsworth, the profoundest, though by no means the most cogent or connected, thinker of the three, denounced the "meddling intellect" which murders to dissect, and strove to strip language itself of every element of logic and fancy, as distortions of the truth, only to be uttered in the barest words, which comes to the heart that watches and receives. On all these issues Browning stands in sharp, if not quite absolute, contrast. "Barbarian," as he has been called, and as in a quite intelligible sense he was, he found his poetry pre-eminently among the pursuits, the passions, the interests and problems, of civilised men. His potent gift of imagination never tempted him, during his creative years, to assail the sufficiency of intellect, or to disparage the intellectual and "artificial" elements of speech; on the contrary, he appears from the outset employing in the service of poetry a discursive logic of unsurpassed swiftness and dexterity, and a vast heterogeneous army of words gathered, like a sudden levy, with a sole eye to their effective force, from every corner of civilised life, and wearing the motley of the most prosaic occupations. It was only in the closing years that he began to distrust the power of thought to get a grip upon reality. His delight in poetic argument is often doubtless that of the ironical casuist, looking on at the self-deceptions of a soul; but his interest in ideas was a rooted passion that gave a thoroughly new, and to many readers most unwelcome, "intellectuality" to the whole manner as well as substance of his poetic work.

While Browning thus, in Nietzsche's phrase, said "Yes" to many sides of existence which his Romantic predecessors repudiated or ignored, he had some very definite limitations of his own. He gathered into his verse crowded regions of experience which they neglected; but some very glorious avenues of poetry pursued by them he refused to explore. Himself the most ardent believer in the supernatural among all the great poets of his time, the supernatural, as such, has hardly any explicit place in his poetry. To the eternal beauty of myth and folk-lore,—dream-palaces "never built at all and therefore built for ever,"—all that province of the poetical realm which in the memorable partition of 1797 Coleridge had taken for his own, splendidly emulated by Shelley and by Keats, Browning the Platonist maintained on the whole the attitude of the utilitarian man of facts. "Fairy-poetry," he agreed with Elizabeth Barrett in 1845-46, was "impossible in the days of steam." With a faith in a transcendent divine world as assured as Dante's or Milton's, he did not aspire to "pass the flaming bounds of Space or Time," or "to possess the sun and stars." No reader of Gerard de Lairesse at one end of his career, or of the vision of Paracelsus at the other, or Childe Roland in the middle, can mistake the capacity; but habit is more trustworthy than an occasional tour de force; and Browning's imagination worked freely only when it bodied forth a life in accord with the waking experience of his own day. "A poet never dreams," said his philosophical Don Juan, "we prose folk always do"; and the epigram brilliantly announced the character of Browning's poetic world,—the world of prose illuminated through and through in every cranny and crevice by the keenest and most adventurous of exploring intellects.

In physical organisation Browning's endowment was decidedly of the kind which prompts men to "accept the universe" with joyful alacrity. Like his contemporary Victor Hugo, he was, after all reserves have been made, from first to last one of the healthiest and heartiest of men. If he lacked the burly stature and bovine appetite with which young Hugo a little scandalised the delicate sensibilities of French Romanticism, he certainly "came eating and drinking," and amply equipped with nerve and muscle, activity, accomplishment, social instinct, and savoir faire. The isolating loneliness of genius was checkmated by a profusion of the talents which put men en rapport with their kind. The reader of his biography is apt to miss in it the signs of that heroic or idealist detachment which he was never weary of extolling in his verse. He is the poet par excellence of the glory of failure and dissatisfaction: but his life was, in the main, that of one who succeeded and who was satisfied with his success. In the vast bulk of his writings we look in vain for the "broken arc," the "half-told tale," and it is characteristic that he never revised. Even after the great sorrow of his life, the mood of Prospice, though it may have underlain all his other moods, did not suppress or transform them; he "lived in the world and loved earth's way," and however assured that this earth is not his only sphere, did not wish

"the wings unfurled That sleep in the worm, they say."

Whatever affinities Browning may have with the mystic or the symbolist for whom the whole sense-world is but the sign of spiritual realities, it is plain that this way of envisaging existence found little support in the character of his senses. He had not the brooding eye, beneath which, as it gazes, loveliness becomes far lovelier, but an organ aggressively alert, minutely inquisitive, circumstantially exact, which perceived the bearings of things, and explored their intricacies, noted how the mortar was tempered in the walls and if any struck a woman or beat a horse, but was as little prone to transfigure these or other things with the glamour of mysterious suggestion as the eye of Peter Bell himself. He lacked the stranger and subtler sensibilities of eye and ear, to which Nature poetry of the nineteenth century owes so much. His senses were efficient servants to an active brain, not magicians flinging dazzling spells into the air before him or mysterious music across his path. By a curious and not unimportant peculiarity he could see a remote horizon clearly with one eye, and read the finest print in twilight with the other; but he could not, like Wordsworth, hear the "sound of alien melancholy" given out from the mountains before a storm. The implicit realism of his eye and ear was fortified by acute tactual and muscular sensibilities. He makes us vividly aware of surface and texture, of space, solidity, shape. Matter with him is not the translucent, tenuous, half-spiritual substance of Shelley, but aggressively massive and opaque, tense with solidity. And he had in an eminent degree the quick and eager apprehension of space—relations which usually goes with these developed sensibilities of eye and muscle. There is a hint of it in an early anecdote. "Why, sir, you are quite a geographer!" he reported his mother to have said to him when, on his very first walk with her, he had given her an elaborate imaginary account of "his houses and estates."[62] But it was only late in life that this acute plasticity and concreteness of his sensibility found its natural outlet. When in their last winter at Rome (1860-61) he took to clay-modelling, it was with an exultant rapture which for the time thrust poetry into the shade. "The more tired he has been, and the more his back ached, poor fellow," writes his wife, "the more he has exulted and been happy—no, nothing ever made him so happy before."[63] This was the immense joy of one who has at length found the key after half a lifetime of trying at the lock.

[Footnote 62: Mrs Orr, Life, p. 24.]

[Footnote 63: Mrs Browning's Letters, March 1861.]

III.

And yet realism as commonly understood is a misleading term for Browning's art. If his keen objective senses penned his imagination, save for a few daring escapades, within the limits of a somewhat normal actuality, it exercised, within those limits, a superb individuality of choice. The acute observer was doubled with a poet whose vehement and fiery energy and intense self-consciousness influenced what he observed, and yet far more what he imagined and what he expressed. It is possible to distinguish four main lines along which this determining bias told. He gloried in the strong sensory-stimulus of glowing colour, of dazzling light; in the more complex motory-stimulus of intricate, abrupt, and plastic form,—feasts for the agile eye; in all the signs of power, exciting a kindred joy by sympathy; and in all the signs of conscious life or "soul," exciting a joy which only reaches its height when it is enforced by those more elemental and primitive springs of joy, when he is engaged with souls that glow like a flower or a gem, with souls picturesquely complex and diversified, or vehement, aspiring, heroic. In each of those four domains, light and colour, form, power, soul, Browning had a profound, and in the fullest sense creative, joy, which in endless varieties and combinations dominated his imagination, controlled and pointed its flight, and determined the contents, the manner, and the atmosphere of his poetic work. To trace these operations in detail will be the occupation of the five following sections.